How We Got Here, Why It's So Hard to Fix
Our government was constructed from a blueprint - our Constitution. The basis of that plan, and the thing that differentiated it from the monarchy-evolving-into-parliamentary-system government it replaced, was to equally apportion power and influence to all citizens (at that time, white male property owners) without regard to privileging factors of family descent, wealth, and religious conformity that had determined power and influence in England.
Flawed as the white-male-property-owner (WMPO) citizenship basis was, the equal apportionment of power to all citizens was truly revolutionary. Yes, the WMPO had to "own property", but the comparatively poor holder of a small homestead was guaranteed the exact same access to power and influence in the new government - via their VOTE - as the wealthy owner of vast properties. Yeah, they stacked the deck for slave owners with that bogus "3/5 of a person" thing - that's the "equity flaw". The "equality principle" was still transformational, even with the "equity flaw".)
Confused about the difference between "equality" and "equity"?
We have been lucky so far. Almost every major change to the Constitution has focused on a) strengthening the equality principle and/or b) correcting the equity flaw.
Today's Democrats and Progressives focus on this, partly from a belief in the fundamental importance of justice. More practically, we know only the combined efforts of ALL of us, fully empowered and with full access to all opportunities, can build a sustainable economic and social structure that will support a large, diverse population and succeed in meeting the existential challenges of our time.
But something's definitely gone wrong. Our government has degraded in many important ways. Everything from a tax code that privileges billionaires to a whole branch of government that has disequalized more than half the citizenry. How did this happen?
Was it a long-planned conspiracy by a small cabal of evil super-powers in the shadows, pulling strings and manipulating puppets?
Ummm, no... that's their shtick, not ours.
Right from the beginning, there were two "cracks" built into our self-governance.
Remember the basis for the "equality principle"? That all rested on the definition of citizenry - who that principle applied to. When we look at it, we see the goal as being to ensure equality, and expand who it applies to, by increasing equity. We believe the very purpose of the Constitution is to provide a framework for that expansion, toward a 'more perfect Union' where all human beings under our Constitution's jurisdiction share the same fundamental rights, and citizenship is afforded to all who are willing to commit to fulfilling its obligations.
There is, however (and has been, since the beginning) another view of the equality principle, based on a view of "citizen" shaped by those who were originally privileged in the Constitution. Reading the document their way, the mission of government is not to build a broad commons held in equity, but to protect the rights of citizens in a zero-sum polity. Historically, this belief is held by a minority, with the extent of its support waxing and waning based on perceptions of threat and socioeconomic conditions.
This legitimate difference in Constitutional interpretation is one of the built-in "cracks" in the foundation of our self-governance. And it has been exploited to create the "culture wars" of our era, far beyond legitimate differences in perception and interpretation based on the second "crack".
This one is built into human nature and exacerbated by our social culture. We'll never be without people who seek power and influence greater than the system entitles them to, or their natural endowments merit. A well-designed system includes fail-safes to limit opportunities for the acquisition of illegitimate power and influence.
But America has always had a near-religious reverence for wealth. Lacking a built-in hierarchy of aristocracy, we create in informal hierarchy of wealth, fed by a mythological sense of "opportunity" available to all. Wealth becomes equated with all kinds of superior character traits from intelligence to self-discipline to ingenuity and drive. Recently, evangelical Christianist sects have even equated it with virtue itself, divinely anointed with monetary success.
Our Constitution did NOT privilege wealth as a path to power, in fact, it explicitly denied that privilege in the "one person, one vote" principle of equality.
But the wealth-worship nurtured in our culture (with encouragement, naturally, from those who have accumulated wealth themselves) created another "crack": The deeply toxic delusion that in America, anyone COULD be wealthy, if they worked hard and/or got lucky - and "the system didn't punish them by taxing it away". This delusion is exploited to subvert those who are not, and almost certainly never will be, wealthy, to support the agenda of those who have already accumulated wealth.
And that agenda, naturally enough, is to acquire sufficient political power to put a "thumb on the scales" to protect their wealth and the means of acquiring more. Which will enable them to use that wealth to amass MORE political power to protect more of their wealth and more ways to keep acquiring it - however toxic, damaging, and exploitive that process may be, however greatly it increases an economic inequity that is eating away at the very structure of our freedom, our self-governance, and the ability of our planet to sustain life.
But this isn't a cabal or a conspiracy. Forget Bretton Woods or Davos or Bohemian Grove - sure those are where the elites meet to suck feet, but they don't actually "control" anything and they have no more ability to lay deep, complicated, multi-generational plots and carry them out than any other bunch of self-interested short-term thinkers. No, they're just individuals making choices, day by day, to protect themselves, and to build support for their agendas. They do share large chunks of their agendas with other rich and super-rich people, but that doesn't mean they're always working together, or taking orders from each other.
And their natural choice, over many, many decades, has been to strengthen the Republican Party, where there is fertile ground to support their agenda. The "protect citizenship privileges in a zero-sum game" mindset that interprets the Constitution as the tool of a natural elite of thinkers and super-capable people who strongly resemble the WMPO "Founders" just happens to potentiate agendas based on the individual right to get mine at the expense of your well-being. The fear-based POV inherent in zero-sum game theory and the "othering" of those who aren't part of the "people like us" who should be protected and privileged made it easy to exploit the "Someday I'll get lucky and then I don't want the Gummint to take it away and give it to brown people" mindset.
As soon as they had some successes, they built on them. Citizens United was a huge success, but it wasn't the result of a shadowy conspiracy. Just lots of money-fueled work exploiting culture-war issues and the inherent vulnerability of an opposition committed to both equality and equity, unwilling to distort equal protections and limit freedoms in the cause of protecting and restoring justice to those most disempowered.
Citizens United hammered a wedge into the wealth-related crack. More money is exerting more power in the sphere the Founders explicitly wanted it excluded from, and using that power to perpetuate and increase its control of the system.
There is no one Evil Genius we can take down to fix this. Not even a "League of Villains" meeting on a private island somewhere. For all their gaudy self-indulgence and florid monkey-wrenching of particular bits of the economy, even the exemplars of a young generation of fragile, amoral billionaires are just acting from self-interest. It's their outsize wealth and the sycophantic cooperation of the GOP that allows them to do so much damage.
Fighting our way out of this is going to take generations, and involve some long, difficult fights about free speech, economic structure, maybe even Constitutional amendments - none of that is easy.
Fortunately, the balance is beginning to tip.
And in the end, if you look back at our Constitutional history, the truth remains: Almost every major change to the Constitution has focused on a) strengthening the equality principle and/or b) correcting the equity flaw.
We will prevail.
certainly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
in response to this agreeing with you but I am unable to do so on here because it would get me in trouble.
So I will simply leave you with this.
